The growth in popularity and usage of electronic cash systems such as bitcoin is in large part due to the underlying blockchain protocol. The blockchain protocol allows for two parties in a computer network to transact directly with each other without a trusted third party, see, e.g., S. Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer to Peer Electronic Cash System,” 2008, the disclosure of which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety.
Protocols such as blockchain accomplish this level of trust by creating distributed, secure, and timestamped blocks of transactions throughout the computer network. Linked chains of these blocks are maintained by a trusted community of participants that forego the use of a third party to validate trust via the community. The financial community has taken to calling blockchain implementations “distributed ledgers.” However, such blockchain usage has already expanded beyond financial transactions and into a wide variety of non-financial use cases.